Walking Shadow (The Darkworld Series Book 2) Read Free Page B

white hair gleaming in the moonlight.
They must mean a shield like the one they put on me
, I thought, and made a mental note to ask how they could see one on other people. The whole point of a shield was to make a magic-user inconspicuous.
    “Okay,” Howard relented. “But we can’t act as his bodyguards.”
    “I… I’m not asking you to. I just… would you let me know if you find anything out about the killer? I don’t… I don’t wanna die.”
    “Oh,
Jesus
,” said Berenice, rolling her eyes.
    “Okay, we’ll let you know,” said Claudia. Even she sounded as though she wanted to get as far away from Conrad as possible.
    “Thanks,” said Conrad, gratefully.
    The silence hinted at an end to the meeting, but he continued to hover nearby. It didn’t escape my attention that he kept furtively glancing at me.
    “Well,” said Berenice, “I for one don’t want to spend any more time in this damned graveyard. You coming, Howard?”
    Howard pushed himself off the tomb. “Sure,” he said.
    As the two of them left, hopping over the low stone wall, Cyrus said, “I have to get back to mine. Might get some work on my dissertation done.”
    “What, at this time?” said Claudia.
    “I only have a week left to get five thousand words done,” he said.
    “How’d you manage that?” said Claudia, raising her eyebrows.
    “Changed my topic at the last minute. I know, I know.”
    “Serves you right for being a psychology major.”
    “Yeah, whatever. See you later, bro.” He high-fived Leo, leapt over the cemetery wall, and disappeared into the alleyway.
    “Suppose we ought to go, too,” said Claudia.
    “How about a quick stop at the Coach and Horses?” said Leo.
    Claudia sighed. “I would, but I actually have to go to my seminar tomorrow, or my tutor will skin me alive. Missed too many already.”
    To my relief, Conrad didn’t follow us back to campus. I felt him watching me as we left, though.
A vampire stalker. Just when I thought life couldn’t get any weirder.
    The wind was freezing cold, so we walked back to campus swiftly. Our breath fogged the air in front of us, and the frost-hardened ground cracked beneath our feet. We conjured lights to see our way through the forest, and it crossed my mind that we probably should have taken the bus, even though it was a ten-minute journey which never seemed worth paying full bus fare for.
    Now the forest seemed an impenetrable wall of darkness, the thick bare-branched trees forming a stern line on the edge of the road.
    “Lights,” said Leo, and conjured one in the palm of his hand. It gleamed, a round white orb that lit up a circular area around him. Claudia and I did the same, and, lights in hand, we attempted to find the path. The stream had frozen mid-flow, its water spectre-white against the gloom of the surroundings. Every shadow looked uncomfortably like a dark space.
    This was definitely a bad idea.
Especially given that there was apparently a murderer around.
    Well, neither of the actual murders had taken place anywhere near campus, but two student deaths had caused a campus-wide rumour-fest that lurked beneath the usual gossip and talk between lectures. One had been a girl who’d lived in Preston, the other a guy in York. Two places that had no connection, two people who didn’t know each other, and the only thing they had in common was they went to this university, and they’d both died from blood loss after having their throats cut with a sharp weapon.
    I rarely paid attention to the news, but this gave me the chills before I’d even found out they’d been magic-users. And vampires. Thinking about it, it proved the Venantium couldn’t hush
everything
up, though they’d be hard-pressed to make the world forget a story that had been on the national news for the past month. From what I knew of memory adjusting―and, to be honest, I wished I didn’t―you had to be near the person whose memory you wanted to erase.
    “What did you do to Conrad